Ranked #2402

Shocking Pink! (Manga)

[Reviewing till chapter 11]
I finished 1 more of Yasui Riosuke's works "Bust to Bust" before reading this one. Similar strengths and weaknesses,
+Strengths being comedy and special characteristics (but for this series it's more blurry and sometimes I can't tell one from the next).
+Weaknesses being excessive sexual scenes, some do not even make any sense, and some sexual scenes seem like repetitions.

Story:6
Supposed to use Three Kingdoms for reference, but I got totally confused with the plot. I did study a bit of The Three Kingdoms and play some games related to them. I am also more familiar with the chinese and english names from that period, but there weren't a lot translated to eng/chinese. For eg., Liu Bei, Cao Cao and so on, were all in the Japanese language.

Plot is of the most concern. The Three Kingdoms is supposed to be a story full of courage, ambition etc. but was turned into a raunchy H love-com. Which is quite terrifying.

And erm, there doesn't seem to be much story progression, since at least 60% of all the panels are sexual scenes. And this is an underestimation.

Art:7
Some pages were used in different colour inks, like blue and brown, maybe they did not have enough black ink?

Other than that, as usual, Yasui Riosuke's art is great! But in this series some panels are a bit unclear. For example, hair colours sometiems change a little and since some characters look similar, I couldn't tell who is who.

Character:6
As a result of not really getting who is what famous character in The Three Kingdoms, I cannot comment on whether the character in this series is really like the real historical character or not.

However, the main characters are obviously part of the Shu Kingdom, with Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei and such in it. Liu Bei's ambitions were twisted into making babies enuf for world domination, or world unification lol. In short, the characters seem quite different from the historical ones.

One problem here is character development, cos they changed the three famous brothers into sisters and so on, I guessed that they couldn';t be strictly following the historical characters' personalities. But there was VERY little character development apart from superficial and a little deeper differences.

In short, you dun even need to have knowledge of the Three Kingdoms to understand up till chapter 11. Just follow what they do in it and it's enuf. Btw, was there someone with a split personality in either Zhang Fei or Guan Yu? I wonder...

Enjoyment:4
As stated above, that's why I didn't enjoy this series much.

Overall:5
Yasui Riosuke's second work that I've seen. Ample sexual scenes but weak on character development and plot. Excellent for those who like H scenes.
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